People

IGSB Fellows

More than 70 faculty and scientists participate in IGSB. Fellows include faculty from the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, as well as faculty from other CBC institutions who participate as Associate or Visiting Fellows. All Fellows are engaged in activities related to the IGSB mission and help development of IGSB goals in the future. Appointments into the IGSB are made for a renewable term of five years.

Fellows and their laboratories benefit from being part of a community engaged in both large-scale and small-scale collaborative science in Genomics and Systems Biology. IGSB offers an environment which attracts some of the best young researchers in the field. The Institute’s goals are being accomplished through a variety of mechanisms including logistical and infrastructure support for collaborative grant applications, development of a junior Fellows program, and supporting applications for pilot funding of high risk projects. Fellows also have priority access to IGSB facilities and infrastructure including the Cellular Screening Center (CSC) and the High-throughput Genome Analysis Core (HGAC).

Habibul Ahsan

Dr. Ahsan’s research interests focus on studying the inter-relationships between environmental and genomic factors in cancer and other diseases and exploiting information on these relationships at a population level in developing and evaluating prevention interventions in humans.

Graeme Bell

Dr. Bell is using various genetic approaches to map and identify the genes that affect development of type 2 diabetes mellitus as well as diabetic complications. He carries out studies in both humans and mouse models to determine the mechanisms by which the diabetes genes they identify affect blood glucose levels. Their studies of pancreatic beta-cells are focused on understanding the transcriptional regulatory networks that determine normal cell function

Joy Bergelson

Dr. Bergelson interested in the ecology and evolution of plant-enemy interactions. Her lab research focuses on the coevolutionary interactions between Arabidopsis thaliana and its bacterial pathogens.

Justin Borevitz

Dr. Borevitz is interested in the genetics of adaptation to seasonal light environments. Quantitative and population genetic approaches in Arabidopsis thaliana are used in his lab to dissect local and regional phenotypic variation.

Folker Meyer

Dr. Meyer is a computational biologist with research interest in metagenomics. He currently has joint appointment with the Mathematics and Computer Science Divison, and the Computation Institute. He is working closely with researchers in the Biosciences Division at Argonne National Laboratory and the medical school at the University of Chicago. Dr. Meyer is the IGSB Associate Director who is responsible on the administrative unit at ANL

Jianjun Chen

Dr. Chen’s major research interests is to conduct integrated analyses of cancer-omics on both protein-coding and non-coding genes (particularly, microRNAs) regarding both genetic and epigenetic changes in the development of leukemia and lymphoma.

Suzanne Conzen

Dr. Conzen’s laboratory uses both molecular approaches and animal models to study mechanisms that contribute to the development and progression of human breast cancer.

Nancy Cox

Dr. Cox research focus is on the identification and characterization of genetic variation influencing susceptibility to complex disorders. We work on both the localization of the genetic variation, via linkage studies and linkage disequilibrium mapping, as well as on the analytic component to positional cloning of genes for complex disorders.

Anna Di Rienzo

Dr. Di Rienzo’s group aims to characterize the amount and patterns of genetic variation in human populations, and to elucidate the forces that shape and maintain this variation. Forces such as demographic change or population structure exert genome-wide effects, while others such as natural selection result in locus-specific effects.

Aaron Dinner

The Dinner group develops and applies theoretical methods for relating cellular behavior to molecular properties. They are particularly interested in how proteins regulate access to genes in the context of the development of the immune system. Understanding how such complex behavior arises from physical and chemical features is a problem in fundamental statistical mechanics, but its solution has direct implications for treating autoimmune pathologies and improving gene therapy and vaccination strategies.

Eileen Dolan

The major focus of Dr. Dolan’s research has been in the area of DNA damage/repair of anticancer agents that has been extended to the pharmacogenetics of DNA damaging agents.

Rick Fehon

Dr. Fehon interest center on the molecular mechanisms by which signal transduction pathways are organized into specialized membrane domains. In addition to their known role in organizing receptors and downstream effectors into functional signaling complexes, such organized complexes function to integrate signaling activities from multiple pathways and to segregate simultaneous but distinct functions of a single pathway.

Ian T. Foster

His research in computer science has led to the development of the Globus Toolkit open source Grid software, widely used in business and science.

Yoav Gilad

Dr. Gilad research focuses on inter-primate comparisons at the sequence and expression levels with the long-term goals of identifying genomic regions of functional importance, understanding human gene regulatory processes and elucidating the genetic architecture of human-specific traits

T. Conrad Gilliam

Conrad Gilliam studies the genetic determinants of common heritable disorders, including neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism, as well as other multifactorial disorders such as celiac disease and cardiovascular disorders.

Benjamin Glick

The main goal of Dr. Glick’s is to understand the processes that generate Golgi stacks. The cisternal maturation model provides a conceptual framework for studying Golgi formation. This model postulates that new Golgi elements arise at transitional ER (tER) sites, which are specialized for the production of ER-to-Golgi transport vesicles.

Michael Glotzer

Dr. Glotzer is interested in cell cycle regulation of central spindle assembly and function. Central spindle assembly begins at the metaphase to anaphase transition, when chromosomes move polewards on shrinking kinetochore microtubules. At this time, non-kinetochore spindle microtubules become bundled to form the central spindle. His lab discovered an evolutionarily conserved protein complex, centralspindlin, consisting of a Rho family GAP, CYK-4, and a kinesin like protein, ZEN-4, that is directly involved in central spindle assembly.

Geoffrey Greene

The overall goal of Dr. Green’s research is to determine the molecular mechanisms by which female steroid hormones regulate development, differentiation and/or cellular proliferation and survival in hormone responsive tissues and cancers.

Robert Grossman

His current research focuses on data intensive computing and data mining; high performance data management; high performance computing; persistent object stores; digital libraries; scientific databases; scientific computing; numerical and symbolic computing.

Richard Hudson

Dr. Hudson’s research concerns primarily on the analysis and interpretation of molecular variation within and between populations. The goal is to understand the evolutionary forces that have produced the observed patterns of variation within populations and between species. My work is entirely theoretical, focusing on the stochastic processes relevant to evolution in finite populations in which genetic drift, mutation, migration and selection may all be important. Monte Carlo computer simulations and methods of statistical inference are important aspects of the work

Andrzej Joachimiak

Dr. Joachimiak is a biophysicist who works in the area of protein structure, a critical aspect of drug design. Dr. Joachimiak and his team at ANL are working to improve methods that determine protein structures including new techniques in protein production, crystal growth, X-ray crystallographic structure.

Michael Kaminski

Dr. Kaminski is interested in developed magnetic and non magnetic nano and microcarriers for targeted delivery of therapeutics and removal of blood borne toxins. He has been collaborating with The University of Chicago Medical Center clinicians including Drs. Axel Rosengart, Richard Kraig, Ravi Salgia, Bahktair Yamini, and others to design carriers for particular disease.

Shohei Koide

The major goals of Dr. Koide research are to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying protein function at the atomic level and to exploit such knowledge to engineer proteins with novel shape and/or function.

Anthony Kossiakoff

Dr. Kossiakoff’s research interests centers around studying at atomic resolution the structural and functional properties that define molecular recognition systems that activate and regulate biological properties. In particular, we study the energetics of hormone-induced receptor activation and regulation of growth hormone and its receptor using X-ray crystallography, site-directed mutagenesis, phage display mutagenesis and biophysical analysis.

Thomas Krausz

Dr. Thomas Krausz is an expert pathologist with broad interests in tumor pathology including melanocytic tumors, soft tissue tumors, breast tumors, lung tumors and mesothelioma.

Martin Kreitman

Dr. Kreitman’s lab focuses on issues in molecular evolution, and especially on identifying forces governing the evolutionary process. The central effort has been to understand the evolution of the alcohol dehydrogenase locus (Adh) in Drosophila. We are studying the evolutionary process on three different time scales—-affecting populations, affecting species, and affecting long-term molecular evolution.

Stephen Kron

The Kron laboratory is a highly collaborative group of cell biologists, geneticists, biochemists and chemists. Their major basic research efforts are directed at 1) dissecting cyclin dependent kinase structure and function in yeast, 2) defining roles for chromatin modifications in DNA damage response, and 3) developing novel mass spectrometry methods for phosphoproteomics and high throughput screening.

Vinay Kumar

Dr. Kumar’s laboratory is interested in the cellular and molecular biology of murine natural killer (NK) cells. These cells are believed to act as the first line of defense against tumors and viral infections. In addition they secrete a variety of cytokines including 1FN-g and GM-CSF that can influence the inflammatory response. Two aspects of NK cell biology are of particular interest to us: the development of NK cells from multipotent progenitor cells, and the identification of NK cell receptors and their ligands.

Bruce Lahn

We are a mammalian biology lab interested in two major research topics: Genetic Basis of Human Brain Evolution & Stem Cell Biology. Our other research interests include neurogenetics, bioinformatics, and developing technologies for high-throughput functional genomics.

Michelle Le Beau

Her research focuses on the molecular analysis of the recurring chromosomal abnormalities in human leukemias and lymphomas, correlating specific abnormalities with morphological and clinical features and the development of risk-adapted therapy.

Wen-Hsiung Li

My major interest is in the processes and mechanisms of molecular and genomic evolution, using both experimental and theoretical approaches.

Chunyu Liu

Our lab primary interest is to understand the connection between genetic factors and human psychiatric disorders or behaviors. Current research project is the genetic studies of bipolar disease (BD) using molecular genetics, genomics and bioinformatics approaches.

Manyuan Long

A fundamental problem in evolutionary biology is how genes with novel functions originate. My research focuses on this problem, although I am also interested in other issues of molecular evolution.

Christopher Lowe

Dr. Lowe’s research interests are in the field of evolution and development, and more specifically the evolution of the deuterostomes. This major metazoan lineage is made up of four major groups; chordates, echinoderms, hemichordates, and a very recent addition; Xenoturbellida .

Michael Ludwig

My research at the University of Chicago (in collaboration with Martin Kreitman) takes an evolutionary perspective to investigate the structure/function of eukaryotic cis-regulatory modules. Our approach has been to use transgenic analysis to functionally characterize evolved changes in the structure of a well-characterized enhancer controlling embryonic expression of even-skipped pair-rule stripe two in Drosophila.

Yves Lussier

The Lussier research group conducts research in the emerging field of phenomics, using computation to model phenotypes, integrate genomic with phenotypic datasets, and analyze phenomes in order to accurately individualize the understanding, the prediction, and the treatment of diseases.

Karl Matlin

The Matlin Laboratory studies the biogenesis of epithelial polarity in both cultured cells and epithelial injury models. Research in the Matlin Laboratory is focused on understanding the biogenesis of apical-basal polarity in epithelial cells. Epithelial polarity is critical for the normal functioning of epithelial organs, such as the kidney and the gastrointestinal tract. Furthermore, the loss of epithelial polarity is an important contributor to the pathogenesis of disease following epithelial injury and carcinogenesis.

Rima McLeod

Dr. McLeod, is internationally recognized for her expertise and extensive research in toxoplasmosis. She specializes in the comprehensive care of congenital toxoplasmosis and other Toxoplasma gondii infections.

Michael Miller

My research addresses mechanisms controlling the growth and allocation of mycorrhizal fungi. Our premise is that predictions about whole-plant responses, especially those associated with multiple forcing factors, will require a better understanding of how mycorrhizal fungi respond to alterations in host allocation of assimilated carbohydrates and soil nutrients and how fungal responses feed back to the host.

Richard Morimoto

Dr. Morimoto is interested in the fundamental events that underlie the appearance of misfolded proteins and their consequence to protein homeostasis, cellular function, and organismal adaptation and survival.

Ivan Moskowitz

Our laboratory investigates the molecular basis of cardiac morphogenesis and Congenital Heart Disease. Congenital Heart Disease, or structural malformations of the heart present at birth, is the most common class of human birth defects. We employ forward and reverse genetic approaches in the mouse to address the genetic basis of structural heart disease. We use genetic, molecular, and biochemical methods to investigate the specific aspects of cardiac morphogenesis involved in Congenital Heart Disease.

Piers Nash

We are currently studying the role of various ubiqutin linkages in regulating signaling events from activated cell surface receptors (the EGF-R and the T-cell receptor), and the role of specific deubiquitinating enzymes in modulating cellular signal transduction.

Marcelo Nobrega

Our group is interested in dissecting the architecture and function of gene regulatory networks. We investigate how the multiple transcription activators, repressors, boundary elements connected to a gene interact and orchestrate the precise tissue-specific and temporal-specific expression pattern of that gene.

Carole Ober

The major research objectives of my laboratory are to identify genes that influence complex phenotypes, to understand their evolutionary history, and to elucidate how variation in these genes influences function. Our laboratory focuses on phenotypes related to fertility and to common diseases, and are conducted in a founder population, the Hutterites, and in outbred patient populations.

Olufunmilayo Olopade

My research interests are diverse and include: treatment of breast cancer, especially in young or pregnant women; familial cancers; molecular genetics of cancer; cancer risk assessment and chemoprevention; breast cancer and minority populations and disparities in health outcomes.

Kenan Onel

My lab studies the genetic basis of cancer susceptibility. Genetically, we are all very similar, but not identical. Some of this normal variation is insignificant, but some may have important functional consequences. Our goal is to discover the critical sources of functional heterogeneity in the pathways that are the barriers against the cellular transition from normal to cancer.

Tao Pan

My lab developed a microarray methods that measure tRNA abundance, its fraction of aminoacylation and misacylation at the genomic scale. We are exploring roles of tRNA in translational control in yeast and in mammalian cells including cancer.

Jonathan Pritchard

My research group tackles the following questions. What is the nature and extent of genetic variation within and between human populations? What are the biological and evolutionary processes that have produced the observed patterns of variation? How do genotypes contribute to phenotypes for complex traits (and how can we identify the relevant genetic variants)?

Molly Przeworski

Our interest is in understanding how different evolutionary forces have shaped patterns of genetic variation in humans, and conversely, in learning about recombination, demography and selection from patterns of genetic variation observed in samples of extant humans. Our research combines modeling, the development of statistical tools and data analysis. The lab is “dry”, although we often collaborate closely with experimentalists.

Ilaria Rebay

My laboratory works at the interface between signal transduction and developmental biology. The long term goal of our research is to understand how complex developmental decisions are controlled in time and space by multiple signaling pathways.

Marsha Rosner

The focus of my laboratory is to determine the critical mechanisms that regulate cell growth and differentiation in response to growth factor or oncogenic stimulation and identify key targets for therapeutic intervention.

Janet Rowley

Dr. Janet Rowley is a pioneer in demonstrating that cancer is a genetic disease. Her work established that cancer is a genetic disease. She demonstrated that mutations in critical genes lead to specific forms of leukemia and lymphoma, and that one can determine the form of cancer present in a patient directly from the cancer’s genes.

Brenda Russell

Dr. Russell’s research focuses on the regulation of protein synthesis and remodeling of cell shape, and on development of a novel cell culture system using bioengineering and surface chemistry modification. Many of her studies have been done in close collaboration with clinicians (muscular dystrophies, urinary incontinence, heart failure).

Ilya Ruvinsky

Dr. Ruvinsky is interested in the evolution of development (Evo-Devo), evolutionary genomics and molecular evolution. The goal of his lab is to integrate developmental, genomic and computational approaches to understand the evolution of genes and gene functions.

Daniel Schabacker

Dr. Schabacker’s current research includes the development of 1) a point-of-care human diagnostic respiratory biochip capable of rapidly identifying both bacterial and viral pathogens, 2) Veterinary diagnostic biochips capable of identifying causative organism(s) as well as antibiotic resistance for bovine respiratory syndrome and bovine mastitis, 3) Threat agent detection systems for rapid analysis (<15 minutes sample-to-answer) of multiple targets providing diagnostic confidence level outputs, 4) Biochips and systems for biomarker discovery.

Olaf Schneewind

My laboratory examines the mechanisms and strategies whereby pathogenic bacteria cause human disease.

Neil Shubin

He researches the evolutionary origin of anatomical features of animals. His most recent discovery, Tiktaalik roseae, has been dubbed the “missing link” between fish and land animals.

Jonathan Silverstein

Dr. Silverstein’s research focuses on the integration of advanced computing and communication technologies into biomedicine, particularly applying Grid computing, and on the design, implementation, and evaluation of high-performance collaboration environments for anatomic education and surgery.

Harinder Singh

Our research is motivated by two fundamental issues in developmental and molecular biology (i) how do regulatory networks of transcription factors specify the generation of distinct cell fates from stem cells and (ii) what kinds of molecular mechanisms are used to orchestrate lineage and stage-specific patterns of gene activity during cellular differentiation.

Seth Snyder

We focus on integrating technologies to sustainably produce biofuels and biobased products. The goal is to design fermentation and enzymatic conversion systems that will facilitate continuous product recovery. Currently we work on organic acids and alcohols.